Empires of the Everyday

An ambitious and wholly original poetry collection that examines the ways that life is confined and sometimes defined by the city and the ubiquity and invisibility of state violence.

The poems in Empires of the Everyday give voice to the many “you” who move through a city—one that resembles many contemporary cities—where plywood shelters are demolished in pandemic winters. The everyday violence is palpable, but the related media reporting is offhand, cool, distanced, piecemeal, uncontextualized.

In an attempt to access a deeper language, the “you” in the poems seek out an AI translator to render visible the broader historical and contemporary contexts of colonization, slavery, permanent war, and Empire. The resulting language, in its bending of what is possible, can only be poetic. The poems trace the relationship between the human “you” and the machine “I” through five episodes: from a distant understanding of the impacts of the city, to a feeding of historical and contemporary details needed for translation, to the translation of the city through poetry, to attempts to resist the city, to possible ends for “you” and “I.”

Powerful, nuanced, and thought-provoking, Anna Lee-Popham’s impressive debut collection asks: How might poetry immersed within the current overlapping crises render a translation of Empire and beyond-Empire possible? What gets found in this translation?